I first met Stanley Kubrick in the spring of 1980, at his house outside
London. It's nice to get a call from a culture hero, especially when you
have so few. It isn't really true that Stanley Kubrick is a weird recluse,
but it's usually true that if you're going to see him, you're going to his
house, which is also his place of work, and business. We talked about many
things that night, but mostly about war and movies. He had a strong
feeling about a particular kind of war movie that he wanted to make, but
he didn't have a story. By "story," I learned, he meant a book of such
agreeable elements and proportions that he could break it down and build
it up again as film; a tree with perfect branches. It was another seven
years, a lot of it uphill, before he showed me the finished version of
FuII Metal Jacket.

I once told him about a dinner I'd had with a director who is at least
as famous for his excesses as he is for his movies. We met to talk about a
movie, but with one thing and another -- mostly the dozen other people
who joined us -- the subject never came up, I know to our mutual relief. It
was a star-studded table and a totally entertaining dinner, but dinner
isn't work, necessarily. And as we left the restaurant, everybody checking
out everybody else, I noticed roughly 300 Pounds Sterling of wine left at
the table, all the bottles opened but otherwise untouched.

"There you go, Michael," Stanley said when I told him the story."Those
guys don't know how to live like monks."

And he does. He lives in a great house (great in the English, not the
American, sense of the word), stocked inside with every toy a hyperactive
technology can provide, but this is just a description of the physical
plant. Most of the space, like the time, is for work. The action is
strictly monastic, secular-electronic but ascetic. By temperament and
through control (he is the control-freak par excellence), he conducts
himself like a monk in the material world, disciplined and
multi-disciplined. That's why his movies are his in ways no other American
director can claim: Stanley Kubrick Presents a Stanley Kubrick
Presentation. For someone who claims not to believe in the auteur, he
makes extremely personal films.

During the next few years, we talked on the telephone. I think of it
now as one phone call lasting three years, with interruptions. The
substance was single-minded: the old and always serious problem of how you
put into a film or a book the living, behaving presence of what Jung
called the Shadow, "the most accessible of archetypes, and the easiest to
experience." It was everywhere in Conrad's work, it starred in all of
Bunuel's films, and it served as my personal co-pilot in Vietnam, where I
learned to know and respect it. It came up out of me a thousand times to
whisper the words spoken later by D.I. Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal
Jacket: "I got your name. I got your number ... Because I am hard, you
will not like me ... I am hard, but I am fair." Damned if you do, warped
if you don't, that's what the Shadow thinks is fair. Only the courage to
look it in the face can subdue it for even a minute, according to Jung, in
so many words; War is the ultimate field of Shadow-activity, where all of
its other activities lead you. As they expressed it in Vietnam, "Yea,
Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no
Evil, for I am the Evil." And the Fear, they could have added.

This is what we talked about in the eternal, recurring telephone call.
Never boring, it was sometimes difficult. Talking to someone who is so
blatantly hard at work can only mean that you are working, too. Writers
stare at their tables all the time, and live such wonderful inner lives
that they can forget to speak for days. In other words, most writers are
manic-depressives, while movie directors are like generals, outward bound,
out there and putting it out there, full of pep, talking story,
brainstorming, performing schedules, highly conceptual, totally practical.
This is compounded with Stanley by what I would have to call his
intellectual fearlessness. His elevator goes all the way up to the roof.
He's a regular mental warrior, and his means are telephonic. He has
tremendous information, and he loves to process it. I valued his
information so much that I didn't even charge him to talk to me. Nor did
it matter that, after seven years' work on a Vietnam book followed by at
least a year on a Vietnam movie, I wanted to become the last person in the
world anybody would think of when they needed a Vietnam screenplay. So
what money couldn't make me do, I did for information.

At the very moment in 1979 that I was making my No More Vietnams oath,
I was sent a novel in bound galleys called The Short-Timers, by Gustav
Hasford. I meant to read only a few pages, but I could see immediately, in
one paragraph, that this was impossible. When I finished the opening
section, I felt as though I'd read a whole novel, and it was twenty-eight
pages long. I knew I was reading an amazing writer. He was telling a truth
about the war that was so secret, so hidden, that I could barely stand it.
I certainly didn't want to be associated with it in my neo-postwar period.
It was a masterpiece that absolutely anybody could pick up and read in a
couple of hours and never forget; and it went out into the world seeking
shelf life without the albatross of my blurb around its graceful neck. I
didn't answer the publishers, I didn't write to the author. I folded. I
felt vaguely ashamed, but I got over it. I repressed it. Later, when
Stanley was looking for war books, I may have mentioned it, but I'm not
certain that I did. When he came across it, he knew immediately that he
wanted to film it. I'd recoiled so far from it that I couldn't remember
anything about it. It came straight back when I re-read that first great
page.

I think that before he found the story and the locations, even before
he knew which war he would be filming, he knew what the movie would look
like. It was the leanness and incredible tact of The Short Timers that
was so satisfying. The dialogue wasn't like any movie dialogue we'd ever
heard before. It was pre-cliched dialogue, the funniest and most painful
distillations of the most extreme experience. The leanness was the story;
lean young men, with only the teenage fat of their innocence to keep away
the chill; and then they lose that. "The phoney-tough and the
crazy-brave," walking the walk and slipping in blood,"Is that you John
Wayne? Is this me?" The moral and political trellises are down, with all
the rhetoric that grew on them. The audience would not be told how to
watch this movie. This would be what the studios used to call a "Who Do
You Root For?" movie, non-explicit in its meanings, low-road in its
production, minimal in expression; highly specific, like Hemingway. Simple
surface, long reverberations.

Stanley wrote a detailed treatment of the novel. We met every day for a
month and talked. We broke the treatment down into scenes, with a titled
filing card for each scene. (One scene, the writer's dream, where the
Lusthog Squad rests between battles, Iliad-style, and talks and talks and
talks, we called "C-Rats with Andre.") I wrote the first-draft screenplay
from this, in prose form. The pages, if any, went out by car every
afternoon, followed in the evening by a phone call. (Gustav Hasford says
that one of his calls from Stanley ran more than seven hours.) If I got
stuck, I'd phone that in, and Stanley would perform a line from his
ongoing satirical revue of Hollywood types. "Don't write it fast, write
it good," he'd say, in homage to Harry Cohn, and, "If it ain't broke don't
fix it." (It's interesting, and often true, that scenes that are written
fast usually play best.) When I finished the draft, he rewrote it, and I
rewrote that. Gus came to London and wrote. Stanley rewrote all through
shooting. Sometimes an actor, through inspiration or incapacity, would
revise all of us. Lee Ermey, the ex-Marine who had been hired as technical
advisor, bugged Stanley to test him for the part of Sergeant Hartman, and
he brought a lot of his own incredible language in, like Orson Welles in
The Third Man.

When Francis Coppola was making Apocalypse Now in the Philippines,
the furies combined to turn the filming into something too much like
Vietnam, and that was only part of what was paid for that great film. The
furies would operate under tighter regulations on Full Metal Jacket.
Except for some second-unit jungle footage, it would be filmed in England.
He found Beckton, on Thames, an abandoned gasworks, and blew it up for Hue
City. The cast was young, and used to short schedules. They heard that
Stanley Kubrick worked his actors hard. They found out. Halfway through,
when Lee Ermey was hurt in a car accident and shooting was suspended for
three months, they really got salty. I went out a few times, by
invitation. ("Hey Michael, wanna get your ass in the grass?") There's
nothing more boring than a film location when you're not busy. It was a
fairly tight ship, better than many, and there are plenty who would sail
her again. Not exactly frisson-free, but that's the movies. Directors
behave like directors, actors behave like actors, the jolly English crew
behave jolly, and the writer watches. Stanley does not get lost on the
set.

It takes a great manipulator to make a nonmanipulative movie. If you
work as a writer on a movie, you inevitably shoot a version of it in your
mind. Just as inevitably, the director will shoot a movie that is nothing
like yours. Yours is in your head with no audience, and his is on the
screen. Almost the first thing that struck me about Full Metal Jacket was
how little it had to do with me. I suffered the usual screenwriter's
losses, and found them acceptable losses. It was very different from Gus's
book, but true to it. I couldn't, and can't, get over the beauty of the
acting. And the next morning, I couldn't remember for a long time what I
thought had been cut -- lines that had been fun to write, whole scenes,
beloved voice-overs, stuff that looked great on the page but couldn't be
performed. I could only remember the completeness of the movie, and how
new it looked to me.

When Viva Zapata came out in 1952, the ads featured a rave from John
Steinbeck, something like, 'The greatest movie of all time." I remember
how I felt when I saw that John Steinbeck had also written the screenplay.
Without the words to say it, I was shocked by the immodesty of it, the
shameless conflict of interest. But I was only twelve then, and had never
written for the movies. At least from the day that Stanley saw the phrase
"full metal jacket" in a gun catalogue and found it "beautiful and tough,
and kind of poetic," he had taken the book and the script, the cast and
the technicians, into his obsession. We'd get out when the movie got out.
Film isn't all that's released when a powerful picture is finished.